Carrying a Nuke to Sevastopol

What should you fear? Well, see how this fits:

You're Breakeven Four Zero One--one man, one engine, one bomb. The year is 1957, the month February, the hour 0200. You're sitting on your parachute in the tidy cockpit of a Douglas AD-6 Skyraider, better known as the Able Dog, checking its systems by the small gooseneck flashlight that hangs from a chain around your neck. A Wright R-3350--the engine that powered the B-29 super-bomber of World War II--swings a four-bladed propeller through a circle almost 14 feet in diameter. Just behind the whirling blades, there hangs a slenderized version of the Fat Man atomic bomb that on August 9, 1945, laid waste to Nagasaki.

The MK 7 weighs 1,700 pounds and measures 15 feet long by 30.5 inches in diameter. If you need to return to USS Forrestal with it still on the centerline--tires flat and oleo struts compressed--the nuke will clear the steel flight deck with six inches to spare. You're sweating beneath your pressure suit, flight suit, survival vest, and inflatable life preserver.

On the angle to your left, the jet pukes in their A4D Skyhawks are being shot into the night like so many rockets. Breakeven Four Zero One doesn't rate a catapult: you circle the flashlight, the flight-deck officer gives you the okay, and you push the throttle to the stop. With a bellowing growl, that 3350 drags you toward a marker that's invisible until you're moving fast enough to pop the tail up. Then all you can see is the red light that glows on the far end of the flight deck, which first leaps toward you and then disappears beneath the nose. The oleos thump off the end of the deck, and you descend to your cruising altitude.

World War III has come, and Breakeven Four Zero One is at the pointy end of the spear, heading for Russia at a fuel-thrifty 140 knots. You switch from internal fuel to the 300-gallon drop tank beneath the port wing. Then inflate the rubber doughnut that cushions your butt. Every three minutes, by the red glow of your flashlight, put a time tick on the chart, closing the distance from Crete to Rhodes. Every 15 minutes, calculate the fuel you've burned. Watch your altitude!

"In our squadron of 22 pilots, we lost three killed by flying into the ground or water during a 20-month period. I thought this was normal."--Tom Beard, Port Angeles, Washington

The clock on the instrument panel is set to Zulu--what the military calls Greenwich Mean Time. Here in the eastern Mediterranean, the day is two hours ahead of Greenwich, and by 0300 the sky has softened from black to gray. You turn north, threading between the islands, each more visible than the one before, meanwhile smoking a cigarette from the sleeve pocket of your flight suit.

At 0312--right on schedule--the Turkish port of Bodrum appears before you, with its palms and fishing boats and pretty castle on a point of land. Remembering the Naval aviators who splattered themselves onto the brown cliffs of Turkey, you advance the throttle, pull back on the joystick, and clear the castle at a cautionary 200 feet and 170 knots. Feet dry! You power the canopy open, lose a section of chart into the pines, and unroll the Turkish flight chart from the toilet-paper core that keeps the route organized. Your course lies northeast, between the mountains. Legalized flathatting!

At 0407 you leave the town of Usak to starboard, rewarding yourself with an apple from the box lunch supplied by Forrestal's galley. Just after 0500--full daylight now, on a cloudy spring morning--it's feet wet and 50 feet again, across the Black Sea toward Sevastopol.

On your right-hand console is the Black Box. You toggle the switch labeled INSERT/EXTRACT, whereupon the green light goes out and the yellow light comes on. In the MK 7, a battery-driven screw gear moves the 10-pound capsule of uranium 235 into a soccer ball of tamper and explosives; when detonated, they will squeeze the capsule and make it "go critical." Long minutes later, the yellow light goes out and the red light comes on. The MK 7 has become a bomb.

Despite the rubber doughnut, a pain introduces itself to your right buttock. You shift weight to the left cheek, pop an aspirin, and wash it down with orange juice from your thermos, sucked though a tube. The 3350 coughs: port drop tank empty! You gain altitude, switch to internal fuel, tickle the primer, and when the engine sounds okay you switch to the starboard drop tank. You could lose the empty into the Black Sea, but the drag doesn't amount to much. Anyhow, you're supposed to bring the tanks back to Forrestal, in case there's a second launch.

It's 0600. In training, you saved lunch for the long flight home, but this isn't training, and the pain is climbing your spine and spreading into your right thigh. You break open the sandwiches. While chewing the ham-and-cheese, which seem especially dry this morning, you practice flying with your right eye closed.

"We didn't have goggles that went opaque until the 1960s. Shut one eye and then open it after the flash was the idea."--Ron Pickett, Phoenix, Arizona

The military calls it "monocular occlusion." Old-time navigators used the technique, too, closing the right eye while staring into the sun with the left, when finding their latitude with a Jacob's staff. You could walk down a London street in 1600 and spot the old sea captains, their left eyes dead as agate marbles.

Your own bomb isn't the problem: bright suns will be rising all over Russia this morning. Not just Able Dogs, but most of the single-seat turbojets in the U.S. Navy and Air Force have been adapted for low-level attack with nuclear weapons, along with the twin-engine Canberras of the Royal Air Force. Following their strikes, the Strategic Air Command will be along with its big Boeing B-47s and B-52s, each with multiple copies of the MK 15 hydrogen bomb.

In addition to flash, there's the blast from your MK 7. A turbojet whips along at 500 knots or more, putting a respectable distance between it and the explosion, but the Able Dog at combat power is less than half as fast as the shockwave.

Not to worry! You'll honk back on the control stick and loft the MK 7 onto the target while you're still two miles away, meanwhile doubling back the way you came. This is LABS: Low Altitude Bombing System.

Back on Forrestal, you reckoned the loft backward from the target to the release point to the pull-up. Then you found an easily recognized landmark to serve as your Initial Point, which today will be Pokrovskiy cathedral in the center of Sevastopol. You've never actually seen the Sevastopol peninsula, but you've spent hours over the spy-plane photographs, and you know the place as well as Pinecastle bombing range in Florida.

Next you calculated the time that will elapse between the IP and the pull-up. This value--15.5 seconds--has been set in the Black Box. In the Hell Hole--the avionics bay on the Able Dog's belly, behind the oil-cooler flaps and therefore encrusted with half-burned oil--the ground crew set the desired release angle and G force. Now, before Sevastopol comes into view, you must accomplish the following:

• On the armament panel, by your right knee, are three red switches. Each is guarded by a metal channel so it can't be moved by accident, and each controls a "store" slung beneath the port wing pylon, centerline pylon, or starboard wing pylon. Toggle the middle one hot. (It wouldn't do to release a fuel tank over Sevastopol and take your MK 7 back to Forrestal. That would ruin the Skipper's day.)
• On the left side of the armament panel is the master switch, likewise guarded by a metal channel. Toggle it hot.
• Now the Black Box again. Check that the mode selector switch is set to LOFT, and that the knurled knob of the timer reads 15.5.
• On the left side of the cockpit, just behind the throttle, is the switch that uncages the LABS gyro. Toggle it. A red bulb glows above the glare shield on the left side of the windshield; a tone sounds in your earphones.
• On the right side of the instrument panel is a gyro with two needles. The vertical needle indicates yaw--your compass heading with respect to the target. Keep it centered.